TeraGrid ’09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration

By Elizabeth Leake

July 6, 2009

Paul Avery, a recognized leader in advanced grid and networking for science, delivered the first keynote address at the recent TeraGrid ’09 conference in Arlington, Va. A professor of physics at the University of Florida, Avery is co-principal investigator and founding member of the Open Science Grid (OSG). Avery talked about the history of OSG, some of the projects that leverage its resources, and OSG’s relationship with TeraGrid.

While the majority of OSG users are from American institutions, 2,500 from 60 countries accessed OSG resources in the past year. From the current rate of usage, it is estimated that researchers will have used tens of petabytes of storage by 2012 and one hundred by 2013. By engaging with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, researchers could need an exabyte of storage by the end of the next decade. Currently there are 5,000 physicists from hundreds of institutes who conduct research at CERN.

The OSG consortium includes science and research communities, national labs, international infrastructures, multidisciplinary (virtual) organizations (VO), technologists, HPC professionals, LHC/CERN experiments, regional and campus infrastructures, education communities as well as computer science and DOE-funded SciDAC projects.

OSG has a distributed facility of 85 resources with approximately 50,000 CPU cores of processing power and about 10 petabytes of disk storage. Its milestones and deliverables are a reflection of its science-driven charter. The leadership of OSG hails jointly from American national laboratory and university involvement where most science is conducted and collaborations are formed. OSG’s leadership is collaboratively focused with international and multidisciplinary interactions. The major stakeholders include the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Jointly funded and overseen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy (DOE), the 2006-2011 OSG project was funded with $30M — split roughly equally between NSF and DOE. There are 35 full time employees who are directly funded by the OSG project while many more are leveraged via OSG’s relationship with consortium members.

Avery offered a brief history of how OSG formed, starting about a decade ago with several NSF- and DOE-funded grid projects. The projects joined forces and in a bottom-up process began deploying test beds and a prototype grid that grew in size and complexity as resources were added from universities, campus grids and national laboratories. At the same time strong links were forged with CERN and the European grid projects to jointly form the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). He spoke of OSG’s developing partnerships with regional grids such as New York State Grid and SuraGrid and its collaborations with optical network organizations that provide critical links for high speed data movement.

OSG’s campus engagement model was developed by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) in North Carolina. By working with campus Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Days and through academic outreach organizations like EDUCAUSE, OSG is communicating its value to colleges and universities. “It seems to be working. Usage stats have doubled since 2008,” said Avery.

“Collaboration between TeraGrid and OSG is an integral component to achieving the nation’s vision for CI,” said Avery as he began to talk about the future of OSG. This vision was articulated in a “dear colleague” letter from the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure on June 9, 2009.

“As an overarching theme, OCI will promote the development of collaborative computational science — defined broadly to encompass research and development of comprehensive CI in all areas described below, as well as the application of CI to solve complex problems in science and engineering — as one of OCI’s primary missions. OCI will work to provide stewardship for computational science at NSF, in strong collaborations with other offices, directorates, and agencies.”

Explosive growth in processing and storage reflects the increasing sophistication and demands of 21st century research and engineering enterprises. However, more effective middleware and management tools are required for applications to scale so that they can efficiently use rapidly growing OSG and TeraGrid resources. OSG is moving to a bridging model to connect heterogeneous resources to one another and to the communities that utilize them in new and interesting ways. These include large digital libraries and public databases, computing clouds, massive distributed datasets, GPUs, visualization, instrument steering, collaborative environments, etc.

Avery noted that a closer OSG and TeraGrid relationship builds on several existing joint activities and substantial overlap in resources and services. Common interests such as communication, campus engagement, training, student workforce development, software licensing, security, science gateways, cloud development, virtualization and administrative tools offer additional opportunities for working together. Another mutually-beneficial goal is the development of a common software stack.

Many are aware of the fundamental differences between OSG and TeraGrid as they originated from distinctly different cultures. TeraGrid sprang from the NSF-funded PACI partnerships, while OSG grew out of a collaborative physics environment. OSG currently doesn’t have an allocation process, though future demand may cause it to examine TeraGrid’s mechanism. Both TeraGrid and OSG recognize the importance of monitoring trends to help them develop systems that will adapt to changing conditions and persist over time.

Even though OSG and TeraGrid have both contributed to the national CI which serves multiple communities, challenges remain in accommodating the expected growth and heterogeneity of the “third leg of science.” According to Avery, “A long-term OSG and TeraGrid partnership offers outstanding opportunities to advance a coherent national CI that is persistent over decades, is international in outlook, encourages federal agencies to adopt consistent strategies, and trains the workforce that will utilize it and continue its development.”

By Thomas Ayres

Claiming no less than a reshaping of the future of Intel-dominated datacenter computing, Qualcomm Technologies, the market leader in smartphone chips, announced the forthcoming availability of what it says is the world’s first 10nm processor for servers, based on ARM Holding’s chip designs. Read more…

By John Russell

Sometime in Q2 2017 the first ‘results’ of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C) will become publicly available according to Rick Stevens. He leads one of three JDACS4C pilot projects pressing deep learning (DL) into service in the War on Cancer. The pilots, supported in part by DOE exascale funding, not only seek to do good by advancing cancer research and therapy but also to advance deep learning capabilities and infrastructure with an eye towards eventual use on exascale machines. Read more…

By John Russell

Transferring data from one data center to another in search of lower regional energy costs isn’t a new concept, but Yahoo Japan is putting the idea into transcontinental effect with a system that transfers 50TB of data a day from Japan to the U.S., where electricity costs a quarter of the rates in Japan. Read more…

By Staff

Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following Dell’s acquisition of EMC in September. In this case, says Ganthier, the blending of the two companies is a 1+1 = 5 proposition. Not bad math if you can pull it off. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Sometime in Q2 2017 the first ‘results’ of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer (JDACS4C) will become publicly available according to Rick Stevens. He leads one of three JDACS4C pilot projects pressing deep learning (DL) into service in the War on Cancer. The pilots, supported in part by DOE exascale funding, not only seek to do good by advancing cancer research and therapy but also to advance deep learning capabilities and infrastructure with an eye towards eventual use on exascale machines. Read more…

By John Russell

Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following Dell’s acquisition of EMC in September. In this case, says Ganthier, the blending of the two companies is a 1+1 = 5 proposition. Not bad math if you can pull it off. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

At first blush, and maybe second blush too, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) purchase of SGI seems like an unambiguous win-win. SGI’s advanced shared memory technology, its popular UV product line (Hanna), deep vertical market expertise, and services-led go-to-market capability all give HPE a leg up in its drive to remake itself. Bear in mind HPE came into existence just a year ago with the split of Hewlett-Packard. The computer landscape, including HPC, is shifting with still unclear consequences. One wonders who’s next on the deal block following Dell’s recent merger with EMC. Read more…

By John Russell

In 1994, two NASA employees connected 16 commodity workstations together using a standard Ethernet LAN and installed open-source message passing software that allowed their number-crunching scientific application to run on the whole “cluster” of machines as if it were a single entity. Read more…

By Vincent Natoli, Stone Ridge Technology

After offering OpenPower Summit attendees a limited preview in April, IBM is unveiling further details of its next-gen CPU, Power9, which the tech mainstay is counting on to regain market share ceded to rival Intel. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Amazon Web Services has seeded its cloud with Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs to meet the growing demand for accelerated computing across an increasingly-diverse range of workloads. The P2 instance family is a welcome addition for compute- and data-focused users who were growing frustrated with the performance limitations of Amazon's G2 instances, which are backed by three-year-old Nvidia GRID K520 graphics cards. Read more…

By John Russell

The Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) hit an important milestone today with the announcement of its first round of funding, moving the nation closer to its goal of reaching capable exascale computing by 2023. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

ARM and Fujitsu today announced a scalable vector extension (SVE) to the ARMv8-A architecture intended to enhance ARM capabilities in HPC workloads. Fujitsu is the lead silicon partner in the effort (so far) and will use ARM with SVE technology in its post K computer, Japan’s next flagship supercomputer planned for the 2020 timeframe. This is an important incremental step for ARM, which seeks to push more aggressively into mainstream and HPC server markets. Read more…

By John Russell

Not long after revealing more details about its next-gen Power9 chip due in 2017, IBM today rolled out three new Power8-based Linux servers and a new version of its Power8 chip featuring Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect. Read more…

By John Russell

Vector instructions, once a powerful performance innovation of supercomputing in the 1970s and 1980s became an obsolete technology in the 1990s. But like the mythical phoenix bird, vector instructions have arisen from the ashes. Here is the history of a technology that went from new to old then back to new. Read more…

By Lynd Stringer

Leading Solution Providers

The 48th edition of the TOP500 list is fresh off the presses and while there is no new number one system, as previously teased by China, there are a number of notable entrants from the US and around the world and significant trends to report on. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

At the Intel Developer Forum, held in San Francisco this week, Intel Senior Vice President and General Manager Diane Bryant announced the launch of Intel's Silicon Photonics product line and teased a brand-new Phi product, codenamed "Knights Mill," aimed at machine learning workloads. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

With OpenPOWER activity ramping up and IBM’s prominent role in the upcoming DOE machines Summit and Sierra, it’s a good time to look at how the IBM POWER CPU stacks up against the x86 Xeon Haswell CPU from Intel. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

The freshly minted Dell EMC division of Dell Technologies is on a mission to take HPC mainstream with a strategy that hinges on engineered solutions, beginning with a focus on three industry verticals: manufacturing, research and life sciences. "Unlike traditional HPC where everybody bought parts, assembled parts and ran the workloads and did iterative engineering, we want folks to focus on time to innovation and let us worry about the infrastructure," said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, validated solutions organization at Dell EMC Converged Platforms Solution Division. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Neuromorphic computing – brain inspired computing – has long been a tantalizing goal. The human brain does with around 20 watts what supercomputers do with megawatts. And power consumption isn’t the only difference. Fundamentally, brains ‘think differently’ than the von Neumann architecture-based computers. While neuromorphic computing progress has been intriguing, it has still not proven very practical. Read more…

By John Russell

HPC container platform Singularity is just six months out from its 1.0 release but already is making inroads across the HPC research landscape. It's in use at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where Singularity founder Gregory Kurtzer has worked in the High Performance Computing Services (HPCS) group for 16 years. Read more…

By Tiffany Trader

Micron Technology used last week’s Flash Memory Summit to roll out its new line of 3D XPoint memory technology jointly developed with Intel while demonstrating the technology in solid-state drives. Micron claimed its Quantx line delivers PCI Express (PCIe) SSD performance with read latencies at less than 10 microseconds and writes at less than 20 microseconds. Read more…

By George Leopold

Tucked in a back section of the SC16 exhibit hall, quantum computing pioneer D-Wave has been talking up its new 2000-qubit processor announced in September. Forget for a moment the criticism sometimes aimed at D-Wave. This small Canadian company has sold several machines including, for example, ones to Lockheed and NASA, and has worked with Google on mapping machine learning problems to quantum computing. In July Los Alamos National Laboratory took possession of a 1000-quibit D-Wave 2X system that LANL ordered a year ago around the time of SC15. Read more…